Fediverse

Lemmy: exactly - so you can either have all of downvotes or none of them, by picking such an instance, but there is really nothing in-between. Yet another example of "in-between" could be to show like downvotes from only members already subscribed to the community.

Mbin iirc doesn't allow downvoting at all and instead has its own system of "reduces", which does not federate at all with Lemmy, but instead acts as just another form of it. And yes those are publicly visible, which puts it ahead of Lemmy in this respect.

Piefed does the exact opposite of what I'm suggesting, even going so far as to hide the identity of downvoters from remote admins, who may need to know such things in order to ban someone who is being consistently abusive. I don't think this is a good experiment. Anonymous polling results would be awesome though, so it depends on which type of "voting" we are talking about here.

Mostly what I mean is that someone who posts content to the Fediverse has to expose themselves in order to do that. Whereas downvoting goes against that principle, allowing someone to do what looks to 99.99% of Fedizens as an entirely anonymous procedure.

Also, a viewer can block a poster whose content they dislike and thereby never have to hear from them again, but not vice versa - the recipient has no choice but to receive votes (up or down). Except, as you mentioned, by going to an instance that disables them entirely. Which does not help all the enormous number of members already in instances such as Lemmy.world.

Hence the roles of content creator vs. viewer are unequal, skewed in favor of the downvoters having more power than the posters. Which can inhibit content creation, and given how lack of content (especially niche) is the primary issue with the Fediverse, it seems like making the roles more equal would help.